If We Were Having Coffee – 3/7/2015

Hi! Come on in and I’ll get you a strong French Roast, tea or other warm beverage. As you can see by the mug we are in New Hampshire today. Although today started bitter cold it is warming up and beginning to feel like Spring! Of course the meter or more of snow on the ground makes it look like Winter, but there has been a huge amount of melting.

This will be a relatively short coffee chat. I have a million and one things planned for the weekend and don’t have a lot of time to sit around. I’ll try to stop by other people’s chats as the weekend progresses.

I stayed busy this week but not much to write about. I sent out the manuscript of my book to two new beta readers. I reread it myself and notice a huge amount of little typos. I’m going to start sending query letters very soon.

I’ve also started another book by a fellow blogger and should have a review sometime next week. Stay tuned!

Thinking of blogs, I know last week I said I’d try to ignore the stats but I haven’t. They are still trending down. Following the curve I’ll have zero views a day by the end of the month if not earlier. I know that won’t happen, but it’s still shocking that the last week of February I had my lowest week in over three months and this week the lowest in six months. It’s less than a third of the views I had through January and February. Likes and comments have also dropped, but not by two thirds, more like by half. I’m not sure what happened. The other weird thing is I stopped getting views from outside of the US about half way through the day yesterday. Typically almost half of my views come from outside of the US. Oh well, I’ll try to stay away from the stats page for a while. I know it just drives me crazy.

Even though I haven’t put up a 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion post in a while doesn’t mean I’m out! I hope to put something up this week and will try to participate in the event for the 20th. The theme for the 20th will center around bullying.

So, that’s about it. I’ve been busy, but have little to write about. I will leave you with my little personal motto for the compassion campaign:

Empathy is the glue that holds society together and compassion is what makes a group of people a civilization. Without holding our hands out to our fellow humans we become savages. We are all in this together, in a closed system, so we must all help each other. How lonely life must be for those selfish people who don’t realize this simple truth! How lonely for anyone who doesn’t realize that all are our brothers and sisters! How lonely must the self-righteous be!

And I encourage you to visit the “linky” so you can see all of the wonderful posts that were put up about compassion on February 20.

Post navigation

30 thoughts on “If We Were Having Coffee – 3/7/2015”

Could the changing weather have anything to do with the stat drop? As it warms up and the sky turns blue, people might be less likely to be indoors reading blogs? Not sure if that’s true but maybe?

I don’t know if you do this or not but one of the most important ways to do a read through of your writing to find errors or places where it doesn’t flow right is to read it out loud. By reading it out loud you will hear the mistakes and the awkward places and the places where the verb doesn’t agree with the subject, etc. It’s an easy and fool proof way to find errors in the writing. So many books could be so much better if the writer and the proof readers read it out loud.

Just a quick peek over my shoulder… Actually, it was the exact opposite. Usually I get a strong hit from you people from OZ and it didn’t happen. And then there is the morning rush from Europe. Didn’t happen. Usually when I get up and check the stats 90% of my hits from the night before are OZ or Europe, I get very few US hits. I got the same number of US hits as I’ve been getting lately but with zero outside hits which means my stats when from two thirds less to five sixths less…. Anyway, as soon as I posted this they started coming back.

It’s a third party thing. If you are having any type of shared event, a blog share or whatever, it allows people to put in the address of their page. You can see everyone who is participating’s page. The coffee share uses a free one but I think the 1000 Speak one was a paid one as it has a lot more features, like a preview. I have’t set one up, but I’ve used them. It works well.

: ) OK, gottcha. I’m not sure. The first time I saw one being used the person said, “Don’t forget to put your post on the linky thing,” And just about every time and every place I’ve seen one being used it was described as a “linky”. I like “linky better than the real name, “InLinkz link-up”.

I think there’s a glitch in WP. Just too many weird things. And it isn’t the first time. Every couple of months some how I’ve unfollowed half a dozen people or so, often people I follow the most closely. Also every couple of months I get a lot of people refollowing me so it seems to happen to others as well.

By the way, I think when the wordpress bots get bored they manipulate the stats just to enjoy the results of their mind games. They likely get some huge grant from a Psyche study group or some such for the resulting chaos.

It’s interesting watching the trends as far as views. usually it slowly goes up, with a little randomness every day. But there is occasionally a big raise or a drop. But I’ve never seen anything like this. I know it’s just one of those quirky things.